Despite playing in legendary punk bands with Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye, Ivor realizes that window cleaning isn't his day-job, it's his only job. While washing the windows of celebrities and using the service entrance to Manhattan buildings, Ivor reflects on where he has been, what he is doing, and where he wants to go.

Life on the Ledge: Reflections of a New York City Window Cleaner

Biographies & Memoirs

Hanson, Ivor

Professionals & Academics

Two Dollar Radio

“A thoroughly engaging read by an enormously gifted storyteller.”—Julie Mars
In 1957, Mary Alice was a rebellious teenager in love with a rich Yankee boy who had just moved to her small Virginia mountain town—much to the chagrin of her God-fearing mother, Lavinia. By 2004, Mary Alice has become a spinster biology teacher who hasn’t spoken to her mother in over forty years.
When Lavinia dies, Mary Alice’s niece, Claire, inherits the family house and moves to Virginia, bringing along a deep curiosity about her family’s dark past—and plenty of emotional baggage of her own.

Beneath the Pines

Literature & Fiction

Beard, Janet

Contemporary

Time Out New York's #1 Best Book of 2008.
"[A] funny, inquisitive novel [that] asks readers to re-examine their ideas of the Western frontier and personal freedom." —Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal
"May be the most hallucinogenic western you'll ever catch in the movie house of your mind's eye." —Erik Davis, Bookforum
"A picaresque American Book of the Dead... in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern." —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Should be as well known as anything by Cormac McCarthy, Steve Erickson, or Jim Harrison." —Paul DiFilippo, Barnes &amp; Noble Review
“Rudolph Wurlitzer takes no prisoners. An uncompromising, wild, and woolly tale.”—Sam Shepard
“Sam Beckett with a six-gun and a sack of rattlesnakes.”—Gary Indiana
"Where has Rudy Wurlitzer been for the last fifteen years? The mental traveler who gave us Nog and the Two-Lane Blacktop screenplay takes another vision quest, this time into the Old American West. His mapping of mythic and sacred landscapes and his ability to distinguish between different tribal world-views makes this a truly revealing conversation."—KCRW's Bookworm
In his fifth novel, Rudolph Wurlitzer has written a classic tale of the Western frontier and created one of his most memorable characters in Zebulon, a mountain man whose view of life has been challenged by a curse from a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he inadvertently murdered.
The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life, love, and death.
Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and the nonfiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places. Among his twelve produced screenplays are Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, Voyager, Walker, and Little Buddha.

The Drop Edge of Yonder

Wurlitzer, Rudolph

United States

"Jay Neugeboren traverses the Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made him one of the most honored writers of literary fiction and masterful nonfiction. This new book is, at once, a beautifully realized work of imagined history, a rich and varied character study and a subtly layered novel of ideas, all wrapped in a propulsively readable story. Neugeboren is marvelous. Part of the power of this intelligently and finely wrought novel is that... thoughts and questions arise unforced from the story, as though from life itself." —Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
"Intelligent and absorbing... subtle and affecting." —Tova Reich, Washington Post
On the eve of World War II, Elisabeth Rofman returns to New York to discover her father has disappeared. She befriends Dr. Bloch—a fascinating historical figure, physician to the Hitler family when Hitler was young, and the only Jew for whom Hitler arranged departure from Europe. Dr. Bloch aids in the search, also hiding Elisabeth’s son, who has escaped from a Maryland institution.
Jay Neugeboren is the award-winning author of fourteen books.

1940

Neugeboren, Jay

"[A] hilariously satirical debut novel. Miller, Lawrence, and Genet stop by like proud ancestors... But it's a more recent generation of mischievous deviant writers (Nicholson Baker, Mary Gaitskill) that truly looms large — Erotomania's closest predecessor might be Baker's The Fermata. [An] ambitious book... [A] biting satire." —Zach Baron, Village Voice
"Sex is familiar, but it's perennial, and Levy makes it fresh." —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Levy seems to have an eye for detail for all that is absurd, commonly human, and uniquely American." —Beth Harrington, Bookslut
"It's a great book, written with flawless verve by a tremendous fictioneer and thinker, and it deserves glory. A classic." —Andre Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse
"[Erotomania] can just as easily be a bookend to the beautifully nuanced prose of Milan Kundera as it can be a long-version story for a nudie mag minus the accompanying photographs. It's all in the context — as it is with most relationships." —Quarterly Conversation
"Erotomania wields a comedic punch that makes it, above all, a fun novel to read." —Nerve.com
Erotomania is an absurdist portrait of a modern-day romance. It follows James and Monica from their early days as couple that is forced to move into a nuclear fall-out bunker so their explosive sex life doesn’t physically harm their neighbors, down the long journey to marriage counseling.
Francis Levy’s short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and The Quarterly.

Erotomania: A Romance

Levy, Francis

Humor & Satire

“Wild as sin and as exceptional as the lower reaches of insanity itself.”—Norman Mailer
“One of the most perverse satires I’ve ever read.”—Jonathan Lethem
"[A] Vonnegut-worthy satire." —Joshua Glenn, Boston Globe
"A postmodern examination of the self that teases the very idea of postmodernism... that rare bit of lampoonery that is both humorous and smart." —Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Half DeLillo's Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill, and half Christopher Hitchens, Linchak is a model pundit for a post-9/11 age: death-obsessed, long-winded, addicted to Googling himself, and, on the sly, an inveterate nose-picker. Crust is about mindless compulsion, or the digital search for oblivion, or a comment on the jaded habits of a citizenry that's had its private domain annexed by omnipotent admen." —Zach Baron, Village Voice
The epigraph for this uproarious novel is from Marcel Duchamp: “Everything that man handles has a tendency to secrete meaning.” In this case, the secretion begins as a crust in the nose of famed novelist Walker Linchak. Its extraction leads to further secretion in the form of intellectual and spiritual insight into “the habit once called nose-picking”; a book, The Complete Book of Nasalism, a memoir about his breakthrough; an endless succession of blog entries; and a constant rush of e-mail exchanges with friends like George W. Bush, who is moved by Linchak’s passion for the habit to confess his own on Larry King Live.
Joining the stream of nose-picking research and literature that already exists on the Internet, Linchak’s secretion generates more of the same in books, the visual arts, all forms of media, academic scholarship, and medical and scientific research on crusts and their extraction.
Crust is the book that Swift would produce if he took on Information Glut.
Lawrence Shainberg is the author of two novels—One on One and Memories of Amnesia—and the nonfiction books Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World and Ambivalent Zen. His fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Tricycle, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for a monograph on Samuel Beckett, published in The Paris Review.

Crust

Shainberg, Lawrence

“Koppelman mostly writes from inside Laney's disillusioned mind, ricocheting between the quotidian details of wife and motherhood and big-picture musings, forming exquisite stand-alone tone poems." —Elle
"[Koppelman's] brave and challenging look beyond appearances of beauty to the ugly reality of a disturbed mind will remain with readers long after they've finished the book." —Library Journal
"Amy Koppelman's I Smile Back is amazing. There's wit, speed, range, and complete authority here. Among other qualities, it has presence—you hold in your hands a pretty wild ride—and a novel as fascinating as this one seems destined to make its way to Hollywood. Read the book, instead: it's bound to be sharper, more moving, and flat-out better than any adaptation will be." —Darin Strauss
"Amy Koppelman probes deeply into the dark and cavernous recesses of a picture-perfect suburban mom, and emerges with one of the most terrifying novels I've read in ages. It's a glorious little explosion of a book." —Dani Shapiro
"Laney Brooks is a heroine on par with Joan Didion's Maria Wyeth. She captivates not only because she recognizes the darkness closing in around her, but because a part of her welcomes it." —David Benioff
In the follow-up to her acclaimed debut, A Mouthful of Air, which drew comparisons from critics to The Bell Jar and The Awakening, Amy Koppelman delivers an unrestrained statement on the modern suburban woman.
Laney Brooks acts out. Married with kids, she takes the drugs she wants, sleeps with the men she wants, and disappears when she wants. Lurking beneath Laney’s composed surface is the impulse to follow in the footsteps of her father, to leave and topple her family’s balance in the process.

I Smile Back

Koppelman, Amy

"Indiana has gloriously revived an obscure Hollywood film of the same name, infused it with eroticism and intrigue - and added Dr. Fu Manchu! The result is a lustrous, laugh-out-loud world of bawd and mayhem; an erudite, charmingly operatic opium den of decadence that seesaws between high brow and low camp and reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers."—Arthur Nersesian
"Ambitious... gonzo social satire." —Publishers Weekly
“A fearless and valuable writer.”—The Washington Post"[Gary Indiana] is the primary reporter of the underground, the dissociation of cultures, the new behaviors; there is a sense that if you want to understand what has happened in America, you would have to read Gary Indiana. And this newest book is a leap forward."-Michael Silverblatt "Like The Wizard of Oz meets Naked Lunch... this strange, filthy, uproarious little novel is a riveting read from start to finish."—BoldtypeIn the internationally acclaimed author’s first novel since Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana applies his prickly wit, nihilistic vision, and utterly original voice to this side-splitting spin on Fu Manchu.
A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land’s End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship the Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort Dr. Obregon Petrie attempt to thwart Fu Manchu’s latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American Piyas, matching wits with a club-footed ex-Stasi, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies.
The Shanghai Gesture is not a genre farce, but a compelling tale that merges the author’s trademark eye for social satire with the beautifully poetic sensibilities of his previous novels.
Among Those That Know, a cabal our story will elucidate in the fullness of time, rumors fluttered that Dr. Obregon Petrie defied the laws of gravity when it suited his caprice.
Gary Indiana is the author of several previous novels: Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Rent Boy, Resentment, Depraved Indifference, and Do Everything in the Dark, as well as nonfiction works: Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, The 120 Days of Salo, Let It Bleed: Essays 1985–1995, Schwarzenegger Syndrome, and Utopia’s Debris.

The Shanghai Gesture

Humor & Entertainment

Indiana, Gary

Humor

#8 of 10 Terrific Reads of 2009. "Charles Bukowski will dig the grit in this seedy novel, a poetic rendering of postmodern San Francisco." -O, The Oprah Magazine
A Best Book of the Year -The Nervous Breakdown
"Where Michel Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road." -The Collagist
"Mohr's prose roams with chimerical liquidity. The magic of this book is a disturbing, hallucinogenic magic." -Boston's Weekly Dig
Following a 30-year-old man named Rhonda suffering from depersonalization, Some Things That Meant the World to Me is a gritty and beautiful work that is creative and hypnotic, and should stand as an introduction of an original new voice to American literature.
When Rhonda was a child — abandoned and ignored by his mother; abused and misguided by his mother's boyfriend — he imagined the rooms of his home drifting apart from one another like separating continents. Years later, after an embarassing episode as an adult, Rhonda's inner-child appears, leading him to a trapdoor in the bottom of a dumpster behind a taqueria that will force him to finally confront his troubled past.
In the spirit of Cruddy and Hairstyles of the Damned, Joshua Mohr has created a remarkable and unforgettable character in this charmingly poetic and maturely crafted first novel.
Joshua Mohr has been published in Other Voices, The Cimarron Review, Pleiades, and Gulf Coast, among others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at a halfway house.

Some Things That Meant the World to Me

Mohr, Joshua

Literary

“Nog is to literature what Dylan is to lyrics.”—Jack Newfield, The Village Voice
“A new kind of American travelogue.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Somewhere between Psychedelic Superman and Samuel Beckett.”—Newsweek
Originally published by Random House in 1969, Nog became a universally revered cult novel and a symbol of the countercultural movement.
In Rudolph Wurlitzer’s signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere.
This edition of Nog features a new introduction from noted critic and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis).
Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me.
Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels The Drop Edge of Yonder, Quake, Flats, and Slow Fade, as well as the nonfiction memoir Hard Travel to Sacred Places. He wrote the screenplays for such classic films as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker, among others, and co-directed the film Candy Mountain with Robert Frank.

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